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| Oradour church - main site for the killing of women and children. |
- 10th June 1944 - Towards the end of the Second World War, in a peaceful part of France, took place the murder of 642 men women and children.
- On the 10th of June 1944, a group of soldiers from the Der Führer regiment of the 2nd SS-Panzer Division Das Reich entered and surrounded the small town of Oradour-sur-Glane.
- They told the Mayor, Jean Desourteaux, that there was to be an identity check and that everyone must go to the Champ de Foire.
- After rounding up all the inhabitants that they could find, the SS then changed their story from that of an identity check, to one of searching for hidden arms and explosives.
- The soldiers then said that whilst they searched for the arms the women and children must wait in the church and the men in nearby barns.
- The women and children were marched off to the church, the children being encouraged by the soldiers to sing as they went.
- Men were then divided into six groups and led to different barns in town under armed guard.
- Then the SS began to kill them all.
- A large gas bomb was placed in the church, but it did not work properly when it went off and so the SS had to use machine guns and hand grenades to disable and kill the women and children.
- One person escaped alive - Madame Rouffanche.
- In spite of being shot and wounded five times, Madame Rouffanche escaped round the back of the church and dug herself into the earth between some rows of peas, where she remained hidden until late the next day.
- The soldiers shot and wounded many people, piled them together and then set them alight.
- Six men did manage to escape from Madame Laudy’s barn, but one of them was seen and shot dead, the other 5 all wounded, got away under cover of darkness.
- After killing all the townspeople that they could find, the soldiers set the whole town on fire and early the next day, laden with booty stolen from the houses, they left.
- The soldiers then journeyed on up through France to Normandy and joined the rest of the German army in attempting to throw the allied invasion back into the sea. Many of them, including Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann, who had led the attack on Oradour-sur-Glane, were killed in the Normandy battles.
The new village of Oradour-sur-Glane, (with a 2006 population of 2,188), was built after the war, at the northwest of the site of the massacre, where ruined remnants of the former village still stand as a memorial to the dead and a representative of similar sites and events. Its museum includes items recovered from the burned-out buildings: watches stopped at the time their owners were burned alive, glasses melted from the intense heat, and various personal items and money.
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Memorial in Oradour cemetery to the |
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